Holiday Cheer

Black Friday Sets New Record for Gun Background Checks, Despair

While Black Friday sales sank throughout the U.S. last week, there’s at least one bright spot for the American economy: guns! Lots of guns! So many guns, in fact, that firearm retailers processed the highest number of background checks in a single 24-hour day, ever.

USA Today, citing F.B.I. numbers, found that in 2015, no one really listened to a year of President Barack Obama making impassioned pleas to place tighter restrictions on high-volume gun sales in the wake of hundreds of mass shootings (“We can’t let it become normal,” he begged): on Friday, the National Instant Criminal Background Check System ran 185,345 background checks, a 5 percent increase from the 175,754 background checks on Black Friday 2014. The 2012 and 2013 Black Fridays, according to a very real list compiled by the F.B.I., also made the top 10 days of record background checks processed.

Prior to Black Friday, the record for background checks run on a single day occurred on December 21, 2012, days after a gunman murdered 20 children and six adults at an elementary school in Sandy Hook, Connecticut.

It’s highly unlikely that gun-control laws have artificially inflated the number of background checks, since there’s been minimal movement in that regard. Thanks to the Brady Act of 1993, background checks are automatically initiated as part of a gun purchase, but proponents of gun control demand that these checks are mandated to consider all records of criminal history and mental illness, and for them to apply to private gun sales and gun-show purchases. While the Obama administration has been pushing for more stringent universal gun-control laws since Sandy Hook, congressional pushback (in the form of a Senate defeat) has prompted the president to consider executive action.

Black Friday’s record coincided with a mass shooting at a Colorado Planned Parenthood, which left three dead at the hands of a gunman. With this incident, The Washington Post has counted, as of November 30, 351 mass shootings in 2015.